The Notion of the Ideal Record : A Study of Idea and Practice at Tradition-Collecting Archives — A Case from Uppsala 1914-1945 (English)

Abstract [en]

This dissertation deals with the work of documenting Swedish folk culture at the Institute of Dialect and Folklore Research in Uppsala. This work is analyzed as a scholarly field and from the perspective of power and resistance structures. The investigation has to do with the gathering of material from the perspective of ideas and of practice. On the ideological plane the purpose of the work of the Archive was to create true and objective historical documents concerning folk culture, factual and linguistic information taken directly from the people, representative parts that could be brought together in larger, functional units. Reality was to be investigated in all its range.

In practice, on the basis of their special competence and interests, researchers by making a subjective choice decided exactly which factual areas were to be investigated. No unified investigation was therefore achieved. Instead, traditional rural culture was chosen for investigation. Certain factual and/or geographical areas were given priority while others were rejected. By means of various strategies the researchers tried to influence the collectors in the field to gather the sort of information that the Archive wished to have. What was collected, however, was also influenced by the interests and knowledge of the collectors and was therefore the result of an agreement between the researchers and the collectors.

The whole enterprise was primarily conducted as a rescue operation, in which the oldest, the most threatened and the most popular cultural elements were to be collected. The old tradition was made to represent stability and continuity. What was modern, learned or literary was eliminated in favour of what was regarded as traditional and genuine. The enterprise entailed a sort of cultural criticism by the researchers of their own turbulent, contemporary world and of the working classes, which were made to represent modern and artificial culture. The material that was gathered, therefore, was not primarily a contribution to an understanding of the popular culture of the 19th century, but rather commentaries on and criticisms of culture at the moment of recording it. It therefore tells us more about the modern human being of the early 20th century that about rural life in the 19th century.